Hedges, branches, gravel and the pier beside the garage
The lanes around Musselman’s Lake and the older streets in Ballantrae are lined with cedar hedges and overhanging branches, and a car that eases over for an oncoming truck comes back with a set of fine parallel lines down the passenger side. The gravel concessions add scoring along the rockers and the bottoms of the doors, a few grains at a time, until the clear coat is dull and the colour below it is showing through. In the newer subdivisions off Millard and Hoover Park the scratch is the same one every second house has: a mirror cap or a rear door dragged along the brick pier of the garage while backing out at an angle past the other car.
The rest are the careless or deliberate kind — a key line in the GO lot, a shopping cart on a windy day in the plaza at Hoover Park, a stripe of someone else’s paint left on a quarter panel on Main Street. Different causes, but the repair depends on one thing only.
Clear coat, colour or bare steel: where a hedge line stops
The gauge is touch: a fingernail that glides over the mark without catching means it sits in the clear coat and comes out with a polish — most hedge scratches and nearly all paint transfer sit on top of the finish rather than in it. If the nail catches and the scratch is a lighter shade of your colour, it has gone through the clear into the base and the panel needs refinishing. If it shows grey primer or bright metal, it needs to be primed and painted before the next winter, because the brine on the 404 will find bare steel on a rocker in one season.
A refinished scratch is not a pen dabbed into a groove. The panel is sanded back, primed where the scratch went deep, painted to the tinted colour, and blended into the panel beside it so there is no edge to find. Gravel-scored lower doors are the same job across two or three panels at once.
- Polish only, no paint, when the mark and any paint transfer stop in the clear
- Refinish and blend when the scratch has reached colour or primer
- Metal-deep scoring on rockers and door bottoms sealed before the salt arrives
- Low-angle daylight photos are the best depth gauge we have from a distance
Fitting it into the commute
Most Stouffville scratch customers already drive past our exit. The 404 south to Sheppard is the route to work for the households on Hoover Park and Millard who commute to Markham and North York, and a polish is done while you wait or take one loop through Fairview Mall beside us. A refinish is a few days of booth time and cure, and we book it for the week you can spare the car — with a rental through your coverage if the scratch is going through a claim, or the GO line from Agincourt if it is not.
On the claim question: a scrape you put on your own garage pier is collision coverage with your deductible and rarely worth claiming. A key line across three panels in the GO lot is comprehensive with no fault against you and often is. Our estimator prices it both ways so you decide with the numbers in front of you.
Questions people ask
Hedges on the lane scratched the whole side of the car. Is that a repaint?
Usually not. Hedge scratches are fine and shallow and most stop in the clear coat, which means a machine polish restores the finish without any paint. The exception is a branch thick enough to dig through to colour, and that shows as a single deeper line among the fine ones. A photo taken in daylight at a low angle tells us which you have.
Gravel has dulled the lower doors and rockers. Is that scratch repair or rust repair?
Scratch repair, if you catch it before the winter. Gravel scoring is thousands of tiny chips through the clear coat, and the metal under them is still sound until salt gets in. Refinishing the lower panels now, with the colour blended upward, is a paint job. Waiting a winter or two makes it a rust job on the same panels.
Can I use a dealer touch-up pen on the garage-pier scrape?
On a chip the size of a pinhead, yes. On a line scrape along a door, a pen leaves a raised bead that shows more than the scratch did and does nothing for the clear coat around it. If the scrape is longer than a thumb or shows primer, send us a photo before you open the pen.